Craig, George, and myself had an impromptu listening session at Craig's today. I dropped by to try my Belles amp with his new Wadia 581i setup, and George happened to be over the same time dropping off his Aeon i's (making room for his newly acquired Ascents). We basically compared my Belles 350A Reference vs. Craig's Electrocompaniet monoblocks, and also compared some speaker cables and interconnects.
In a nutshell, Craig's Wadia/Electrocompaniet setup (with balanced interconnects) beat the Wadia/Belles setup (with RCA connections), primarily because of cleaner, more detailed bass, and a tad more precise imaging. Switching to Audience Au24 RCA interconnects brought out more detail and resolution with the Belles amp, but still not quite as detailed as Craig's balanced setup. We did NOT try RCA interconnects with the Wadia/Electrocompaniet, nor did we demo my tube-rectified Modwright, as we needed Balanced to RCA adaptors. I'm *hoping* the balanced connection was the reason for the improved sonics, but time will tell.
Regardless, all three of us agreed that various interconnect cable flavors CLEARLY make a difference, with the Audience clearly better than my default Blue Jeans Cable, and Craigs other inexpensive RCA pair (forgot the brand). We also prefered the Audience speaker cables over his Harmonic Tech hoses, but the difference was not as apparent as with the interconnects.
Since I'm about to totally reconfigure my listening room, I'm not gonna make any changes until the new furniture arrives, and I have time to tweak the system further. Given what I heard today, I'll likely upgrade to Audience Au24 speaker cables and interconnects as the next step, seeing how they sound with the Modwright. After that... all bets are off!